Meeting Management Tips for Dealing with Mobile Teleworkers

By Annie Tsai, PGi Director of Customer Experience
The Mobile Meeter: Colleague who hosts and attends meetings in the airport lounge, the carpool line or the home office.

Make it easy for your MM to dial in.
If your MM takes calls on their iPhone, make sure to put the phone number and passcode in the body of the meeting invite in addition to the “Location”. When your MM opens their calendar invite where the dial-in info is in the “Location” section, they can’t click to dial. They are forced to write down the info and hand key it in. If you put the dial info in the Body, the click-to-dial works just fine.

Hey You, MM! Use a Noise Canceling Headset!
For all you MMs out there … Invest in a noise-canceling headset so background noise doesn’t get in the way of your message. There are a number of fantastic noise-canceling Bluetooth headsets that will make it seem that you’re in a closed-door conference room. I’ve used the BlueAnt Z series, Jawbone series, and Plantronics Voyager series, and loved them all for different reasons. My personal fave remains Jawbone 2 by Aliph, which wins on style, comfort, and most importantly—taking a call while driving in the car with the windows down and not sounding like you’re in a tunnel” challenge.

Toolbox Reminder: Use Your Mute.
Remind everyone at the beginning of every meeting how to mute their line, and ask that they do when they are not speaking. If you find this doesn’t fix the situation, you can always mute-all as the meeting owner and ask participants to “un-mute” themselves as needed.